


Follow the Leader

by nb_richie (shipit)



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Addiction, Drugs, M/M, One Sided Love, Pining, sex mention, unhealthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:05:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13756923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipit/pseuds/nb_richie
Summary: Ever since they were kids, Richie knew he'd do anything for Bill.





	Follow the Leader

Ever since they were kids, Richie knew he’d do anything for Bill. He always has. When they were on the playground as children, he ran his mouth off to bullies to get their attention away from Bill’s childhood stutter. When Bill had to do a presentation, Richie wouldn’t shut up the whole time and the teacher wound up giving Bill a good grade out of pity from the interruptions. When Georgie died and Bill’s parents all but abandoned him, Richie was there for him every step of the way. When that killer clown was about to drag Bill off and eat him, Richie picked up a bat and fought. When the Bowers gang cornered Bill in the school bathrooms, Richie made fun of them until they forgot about Bill. When Mike and Bill broke up, leaving him crushed, Richie spent an entire weekend with him reading comics and doing funny voices for every character. The two of them are best friends, that’s what best friends do. 

That’s why Richie’s at this stupid party. It had been Bill who was invited, and subsequently convinced him to come along. “Find s-s-some girl,” he had said. “Help you unwuh-wind.” Richie had nodded and agreed to come along, if only so that he could keep an eye on his best friend and make sure that he didn’t do something too stupid.

Lately, Bill’s been hanging around with a bad crowd, the kind of people who hand him a little ziploc baggie of white powder with a wink and a slurred implication of the kind of payment they expect in return. He never fails to give it, often using the bodies of his friends as surfaces to do the drugs off of.

And every party he goes to, every mysterious drug he takes, Richie is right behind him like a puppy, ready to pick up the pieces and care for an inebriated Bill.

Between sips of an alcoholic concoction that tastes like stale bread and cherries, Richie follows Bill with his eyes. With every jump to the beat, Bill’s shirt rides up, exposing sharp hip bones and a flat stomach whose padded protection has been stolen by a steady diet consisting solely of liquor and opiates. At some point, the worn backwards baseball cap Bill put on before leaving the house has fallen off of his head, leaving his wild rouge hair to plaster to his sweat-sticky forehead. Soon, Richie should drag him home.

“Hey.”

Richie turns to the side at the sudden voice, finding a young woman with huge green eyes and crazy brown hair staring at him. Her fingers twitch. She’s a tweaker, then. “Hey,” he says, more to be polite than anything.

“I was thinking, maybe you’d wanna go upstairs, have a little fun?”

He can’t keep an eye on Bill from upstairs, but he had been told to relax. Maybe this’ll be good for him- maybe it’ll help him get his mind off of how strong the desire to give in and kiss Bill’s chapped, swollen lips is. Richie nods and lets her lead him out of the room and toward a staircase that goes up, up, up, in dizzying spirals past floors and floors of drunk and high people filling the frat house until they finally reach one practically devoid of people. There are lines of doors, most of which have socks or in one case, panties, hung over the doorknob. Occupied. The girl takes him to one that’s empty and once they’re inside, door shut and marked, she shoves him back onto the bed and climbs on top of him. Her skin is warm where his hands find her hips. Her lips are soft where they caress his neck. Her breath is damp on the shell of his ear where she tells him how good he feels.

He feels nothing. 

She eventually leaves him with a giggle and a spark in her eye, searching for someone else to entertain her. By the time Richie drags himself to his feet and redresses, she’s long gone. He stumbles back downstairs and continues his abandoned task of looking after Bill.

After searching everywhere and finding nothing, his lungs begin to clench in panic. At some point he remembers his phone and gives Bill a call. It rings once. Twice. Thrice.

The voice that answers is slurred and does not belong to Bill, but says that he’s down the street in a car that they’re hot-boxing. Richie asks to talk to him, but before he finishes his sentence, the voice on the other end hangs up with a click. Without another choice, Richie stumbles out of the house and scans the street for a crowded car. He sees one, just down at the stoplight, that has an interior cloudy with smoke that’s occasionally shut through by a hand slamming against the windows. Richie walks over to it, prepared to haul Bill out and take him home where they can both recover.

When he gets there and opens the door, smoke and a heavy scent of weed pour out and settle in a strange fog at his feet. “Dude, what the fuck?”

He looks into the car and sees Bill, naked from the waist up and with his head lolling back, draped across the two front seats under a man who could probably crush either of them without a second thought.

“I’m taking him home,” Richie says flatly. 

The man looks like he wants to argue, but thinks better of it and helps Richie get Bill out of the car and onto his own two clumsy feet. The smell makes Richie gag. Weed from the car, sweat and alcohol from Bill’s body, and the faint stench of someone throwing up several feet away.

Bill laughs and collapses forward onto Richie. “We should- we should get get D-Denny’s,” he giggles. 

Against his better judgement, Richie agrees. Maybe it’ll help him sober up, and by then hopefully Richie will have found the balls to tell Bill that this has to stop. Every time, these parties get crazier and Bill always winds up sobbing the next morning over some mistake he made while he was drunk or high off his ass. If he hadn’t come when he did, Richie’s sure that whatever the man in the car did would have been one of the things Bill regretted. 

He takes Bill to the car they used to get here and buckles him into the front seat. While Bill fiddles with the lock on the door, Richie gets in too and starts driving. How did it come to this? Since when is Bill, strong, capable Bill, a druggie who lives his life either in tears, catatonic, or getting high? Richie can’t blame him, given what they’ve been through, but he doesn’t know how it got this bad or why he didn’t notice. 

On a whim, Richie decides not to get food and just to take them both home to their shared apartment. Bill is too tired to resist being dragged upstairs and dropped on the couch. 

“Why do you do that?” Richie blurts out. “Why do you go get fucked up and leave me to take care of you?”

Instead of answering, Bill smiles a dopey grin and his head falls back. In seconds, he’s asleep. 

“Right,” Richie says softly, and goes to take a shower to wash the night away. 

**Author's Note:**

> Catch me on tumblr @beepbeep-rich


End file.
